Decimare

Decimare is a Latin verb meaning to take a tenth. From this origin enter the English decimate (to destroy a tenth) and decimation (the act or process of taking a tenth). The word’s literal sense is tied to the idea of removing one-tenth of a group.

Historically, decimation referred to a Roman military punishment in which one soldier in every ten in a cohort was killed by lot for crimes such as mutiny, cowardice, or desertion. The surviving soldiers would continue to serve, though the practice’s exact frequency and implementation are debated among historians. Some sources describe decimation as a formal procedure, while others treat it as a rare or symbolic punishment rather than a regular policy.

In contemporary usage, decimate commonly means to destroy a large portion of something, not necessarily a precise one-tenth. Some style guides warn against assuming the literal historical meaning, noting that the modern sense can be hyperbolic or metaphorical, especially outside historical contexts.

In science and engineering, decimation has a specialized meaning related to downsampling a data stream or signal by an integer factor, thereby reducing the sampling rate or data size.

Etymology details: decem- derives from decimus meaning tenth, with the verb-forming suffix -are. The related noun decimatio describes the act itself and helped seed the modern English terms decimate and decimation.